The Ladder Built in Midair: Part One of 'The Vanguard in Retreat'

What the Connections convention revealed about the dispersed layer, the Greens question, and the double mechanism wearing down the socialist left in England

TL;DR: Roughly 150 people gathered in Sheffield on 6 June for the Connections convention, convened by a network that emerged from Your Party’s proto-branch infrastructure. The convention passed a modest statement committing to stay together, support the Socialist Federation’s founding congress, and launch a Socialist Education and Debate Association. More delegates abstained or did not vote than actively supported the final text — a measure of how little conviction the Connections milieu currently has in its own project. The deeper story is structural: the English socialist left is being worn down by repeated vehicle failure, while the union movement’s activist base is moving away from Labour faster than its bureaucratic structures, and an alert section of the post-Corbyn layer has reoriented towards the Greens under Zack Polanski rather than towards rebuilding Labourism. Sheffield was a gathering of the rearguard. That does not make it worthless. It makes it honest.

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People came from Devon. From Scotland. From Manchester, from Camden, from Leicester, from Lewisham. One comrade arrived, spoke, and was back at the train station before most delegates had found their seats for the afternoon session. That is worth registering before anything else: roughly 150 people made the journey to Sheffield on Saturday, 6 June, many of them carrying a year or more of organisational exhaustion, most of them without a clear idea of what they were going to agree by the end of it. Eighty of them were in the room for the final vote.

That is what part of the broad vanguard looks like when the vehicles have failed. Not a mass meeting. Not the 800,000 email signups that lit up the left two years ago when Your Party launched. A room of 150, working out carefully and sometimes painfully whether there is anything left to work with.

The Connections convention, held on 6 June and convened by a network, formerly Transform, that emerged from the Your Party proto-branch infrastructure, was not a founding conference. It was not a regroupment congress. It was something harder to name and, in some respects, more honest: a gathering of the layer that the successive vehicle failures of the last decade have both produced and depleted, trying to work out what the next twelve months should look like. Red Mole will publish a longer analytical series on the broad-vanguard question shortly. This is the dispatch from the room and the first part of that series; the analysis follows.

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The double mechanism

Before the substance of the day, a structural observation that the convention itself kept circling without quite naming.

The British socialist left has been attempting to build new parties for forty years. The Socialist Labour Party, the Socialist Alliance, the Scottish Socialist Party, Respect, TUSC, Left Unity, the People’s Assembly mobilisations, Corbyn-era Labour, Your Party: each of these formations gathered energy, sometimes in spectacular quantities. The 800,000 signups to Your Party’s mailing list were not a fiction. The enthusiasm was real, the desire for a political alternative was real, and many of the people in Sheffield had given years to one or more of these projects before arriving at the same conclusion: it had not held.

What the pattern produces, and what Sheffield made visible, is a double mechanism. Each failed attempt mobilises the layer: it draws in people who would not otherwise have been active, builds local connections, creates organising capacity that did not exist before. Then it collapses, and the collapse depletes the same layer it mobilised, sometimes leaving fewer people with more exhaustion and a deeper scepticism about whether the next vehicle will be different, but also leaving others with a clearer idea of what to do next. The layer is not simply demoralised by external defeats. It is worn down by the repeated experience of building something and watching it fail from the inside. But at the same time, this experience builds resilience and insights, working relationships, and a growing distrust of the left bureaucracy.

This mechanism runs alongside a second, slower one involving the trade unions, though the picture is less linear than it might appear.

After the catastrophic May 2026 local elections, all eleven affiliated unions publicly stated that Starmer would not lead Labour into the next general election. Unite’s leadership described the writing as being on the wall. More than ninety Labour MPs called for his resignation. At the activist base level, the break from Labour is moving with some speed. At the bureaucratic level, the movement is far more cautious: the GMB and Community expressed concerns about entering leadership disputes, and several union leaders who have privately abandoned Starmer show no sign of drawing organisational conclusions from that abandonment.

The debate this produces on the socialist left is not the right debate. The question of whether unions should disaffiliate from Labour has a poor balance sheet: the historical evidence, including from Scotland, suggests that when unions disaffiliate they tend to drop out of politics in practice rather than redirect their energies towards a new formation. The RMT was not even a voluntary disaffiliation — it was expelled. The FBU in Scotland did not re-affiliate but has not thereby become an engine of socialist regroupment. Calling for disaffiliation is, in most circumstances, calling for unions to go quiet.

The more productive approach is to develop a clear statement of union policies and ask electoral candidates to endorse it — then back whoever is closest to that platform, whether or not they carry a party label the left approves of. This sidesteps the institutional trap. It builds a material relationship between socialist organisations and union members around concrete demands rather than around organisational affiliation. And it is achievable in the current conjuncture in a way that formal disaffiliation is not.

The Sheffield room had trade unionists in it, but it did not have trade union structures, and the meeting was organised by activists rather than by union branches. The more interesting development is the growing layer of unions not affiliated to Labour at all: United Voices of the World, sections of the FBU, the RCN and BMA as industrial actors in their own right. That layer is a more productive terrain for socialist engagement than the disaffiliation debate inside the TUC affiliates.

Both mechanisms were present in the contributions from the floor. A comrade from Stockport described the collapse in Your Party branch attendance, good people expelled or made to feel unwelcome. One from Greater Manchester described branches simply falling off, people scattering without a decision having been made. Another, with more than thirty years on the left, put the arithmetic bluntly: fewer than 300 people had attended either the Connections convention or the Socialist Federation’s parallel meetings combined. That is not a mass moment. It is the end of one.

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The room

The Connections network has always been explicit about what it is not: not a new party, not a rival to Your Party while Your Party still exists, not a rival to the Socialist Federation as it forms. The opening contributions framed the day accordingly. One of the network’s founding voices, appearing via video call after illness prevented in-person attendance, argued against any rush to a new party. The case was patient: local initiatives first, political education, the Camden People’s Alliance model of community organising, rooted in concrete struggles before electoral ambition. Another of the platform speakers, from the Your Party central committee, was more cautious still: the task is to stay organised, she said, not to pretend the differences in the room represent a unity that does not exist.

That framing held, broadly, through the morning session. Both currents that reflect the views of the ICL, the Spartacist League and the ISA (Revolutionary), argued that the socialist movement must be built explicitly in opposition to the Greens, not in a conditional alliance with them. A comrade from Workers Power, the British section of the International Socialist League, argued for local assemblies uniting trade unionists, tenants’ organisations, and community campaigners around cost-of-living demands, as the practical basis for rebuilding the layer’s presence in its communities. A delegate still inside Your Party argued for patience: the Labour Party took decades to build branch infrastructure, and the federation form might still work from within.

The one contribution from the floor that had the quality of something true rather than something argued: Your Party built its ladder in midair and expected the working class to climb up to it. The working class needs to be organising from the ground before any ladder has purchase.

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The Greens question

No single question divided the room more cleanly, and it is the question that bears most directly on what happens next.

Several platform contributions welcomed the Greens’ recent electoral gains, the rise of Zack Polanski, the willingness of some Green candidates to say things ‘the left should be saying.’ The Spartacist League demanded a sharp line against the Greens entirely. A comrade from the floor made the point that simply calling the Greens a petty-bourgeois party will not convince a young person who sees Green candidates as the most effective opposition to the far right: you have to be concrete, grounded in what happens when the Greens actually hold power.

That last point is correct. Several Green councils are currently preparing cuts; Greens Organise anticipated that with its anti-austerity pledge. The evidence is available: Green councillors are under the same pressures as Labour’s. The argument can be made without caricature, and it has to be made without caricature if it is going to land.

But the convention’s inability to get further than this reflects something more than a tactical disagreement. It reflects an empirical reality that several contributions skirted without quite stating: a substantial portion of the people who were drawn to Your Party are now in or around the Green Party. The numbers are not ambiguous. Since Zack Polanski took the leadership in September 2025, Green Party membership in England and Wales has surged from around 70,000 to more than 200,000. In March 2026 the Greens won the Gorton and Denton by-election, overturning a Labour majority and pushing Labour into third place. These are not the metrics of a party absorbing the merely disillusioned. They are the metrics of a party absorbing organised activists: people who came out of the Palestine movement, out of Your Party’s proto-branches, out of the left milieu that Sheffield was trying to hold together.

The clearest indicator of where this reorientation is concentrated is an absence. rs21 (Revolutionary Socialism in the 21st Century, the ecosocialist organisation that emerged from the 2013 SWP crisis and had been active in both Your Party and Palestine solidarity work) was not at Sheffield. Their published output gives some indication of why. In a recent piece on the Gorton and Denton by-election, rs21 describes the Greens under Polanski as ‘the insurgent socialist party,’ frames Labour’s attacks on Green policy as fearmongering with fascistic undertones, and writes throughout from a position of clear political solidarity with the Green challenge rather than critical distance from it. That is not the language of an organisation holding the Greens at arm’s length. Activists in and around both rs21 and the broader Your Party milieu have noted a pattern consistent with a strategic reorientation: the judgement, not yet formalised in any published document, that the terrain where the left can actually grow in England and Wales runs through the Greens rather than through one more attempt at an explicitly socialist formation.

Whether that assessment is correct is a serious strategic question. The choice is not irrational. It may be strategically mistaken, in ways the German Greens’ trajectory illustrates clearly enough: Die Linke spent years accommodating to the Greens, and the result was a split, the BSW, and Green municipal councils implementing austerity with a clear conscience. The British Greens will face the same structural pressures. Several already are. But the activists making this choice are responding to real conditions, and any socialist current that treats their decision as simple betrayal is not doing serious analysis. To counter austerity, activists inside and outside the Green parties need to organise together.

The Spartacist position — build against the Greens — mistakes the symptom for the disease. The comrades who have moved towards the Greens are part of the broad vanguard doing the best available work with the blunted instruments the dispersal has created. But the contributions that simply welcomed the Greens’ performance were wrong differently: they confused absorption with advance. The Greens have grown passively, in the space vacated by Labour’s rightward lurch and Your Party’s collapse. Passive growth under those conditions does not produce a programmatic alternative to capitalism. It produces what the German Greens produced: a coalition partner for social democracy, implementing austerity with a clear conscience and a bicycle lane.

Any formation positioning itself as a pole of anticapitalists in England or Wales will be fatally compromised if it fails to reckon with this reality. Not by opposing the Greens, but by being present where the alert section of the layer now is; by doing the connective work across the dispersal rather than demanding the dispersal reassemble on its own terms. Trends in Scotland and Wales are different. The Scottish Greens are not the dominant destination for the dispersed left in Scotland; the former Your Party Scotland structures are developing along a different trajectory, with organisations like the Edinburgh and Lothians Socialist Association — positioning itself in the People Before Profit tradition and now building its public presence through a media outlet and podcast called Frontline — pointing towards a model closer to the Irish experience. Sheffield was substantially an English event, and the analysis applies most directly to England and Wales.

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What the convention actually agreed

The lead statement adopted by the convention, as amended, commits Connections to continuing as ‘an alliance of local independent socialist groups and YP proto-branches, welcoming all socialists regardless of political affiliation.’ It calls for maintaining local groups whether inside or outside Your Party, creating a discussion journal, holding local and regional aggregate meetings in summer and autumn, collaborating with the All-London Delegate Assembly, the Greater Manchester Your Party Branches network, and the Cornwall Socialist Network, supporting SEDA (The Socialist Education and Debate Association is a newly formed body created at the founding conference of the Socialist Federation), supporting and participating in the Socialist Federation’s founding congress in September 2026, and potentially organising an additional all-Britain conference aimed at a socialist challenge in the 2027 local elections. A second statement calls for local open meetings to organise against the cost-of-living crisis, aimed at building a national anti-crisis assembly.

All of that passed. But the more revealing fact is this: more attendees in the final session abstained or did not vote than actively supported the final text. The statement’s modest ambitions did not produce confident endorsement. They produced the kind of weary assent that says: we do not know what else to propose.

The SEDA proposal is the most analytically interesting outcome: not a federation, not a party, but a space for programmatic debate across the fragments, with an explicit commitment to ‘potentially contentious political questions.’ Whether it survives its first serious controversy — Ukraine, the Greens, programme — is a different question. The commitment is correct. The institutional weight behind it is thin, especially if the Federation or SEDA don’t take extra action to orient to ecosocialists in the Green Party.

What the vote obscures is the gap it does not close. The proto-branches feeding the network are struggling at exactly the moment the convention was trying to revive them. The membership data is not in the hands of the protobranches; it is in the hands of the Your Party leadership, which has shown no inclination to share it other than at a snail’s pace in the areas they feel able to control (We’re especially interested in the founding of YourParty Cymru next month). The layer around the protobranches is real, it is still there, but it lacks the shared agitational project that would make local organising coherent rather than improvised.

One of the attendees from the Edinburgh and Lothians Socialist Association put it directly: the emphasis in Scotland has been on serving communities, running listening campaigns, organising practical activity that is concrete and makes the left seem useful and helpful. Not programmes first. Not constitutions first. Relationships first. That is the correct priority. It is also a priority that does not require a new party or a new federation to pursue. It requires comrades who turn up, in the specific place, for the specific issue, consistently enough that trust accumulates.

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What Sheffield tells us

The layer is exhausted. It came from Devon. It stayed, mostly, for the workshops and an excellent lunch. It argued about the Greens and the Transitional Programme and the relationship between local campaigning and national politics. It voted on amendments with more abstentions than ayes. It did not dissolve. It is still there; that matters.

It is also more politically varied than any single organisational form can hold. The Spartacist League and their ISA(R) mini-me was in the room. Workers Power was in the room. Democratic Socialists, the Socialist Federation current, the Camden People’s Alliance model, comrades still inside Your Party, comrades who had left: all in the same building, most declining to vote on the same statement. The range is a problem for party-building. However, it is not a big problem for the connective tissue work the current period actually requires.

The unions will not resolve this through disaffiliation. They will resolve it, slowly and unevenly, through the accumulation of policy conflicts with Labour governments that cannot deliver what union members need. The productive socialist response to that process is not to wait for institutional rupture but to develop the policy benchmarks that allow socialist formations to back the closest available candidate at each election, building the material relationship between organised labour and the ecoocialist left from the ground up rather than from the bureaucratic apex down.

The ACR conference is on 4–5 July (Anticapitalist Resistance is the Fourth Internationalist organisation in England and Wales). The Socialist Federation founding congress is in September. The Makerfield by-election result arrives on 18 June, and the left’s relationship to Andy Burnham’s Labour leadership campaign is already a fault line. Each of these is a test of the same question Sheffield raised: whether the left can do the patient work of connecting the dispersed layer without either dissolving into the formations it currently occupies or demanding the layer change vehicles before the consciousness for a new one exists.

Sheffield did not answer it. It demonstrated that 150 exhausted people are still asking it — and that rather more of them are unsure enough about the answers to abstain than are confident enough to vote yes. The analysis of what the asking requires is the subject of the next piece in this series.

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Red Mole is an independent publication in the Fourth International tradition. ‘The Vanguard in Retreat, Part Two’ will develop the analytical framework this dispatch has drawn on.

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